- Source: Oregon Criminal Justice Commission
IDENTITY THIEVES can ruin anything in the digital age—including, it turns out, attempts to give them less prison time.
With a year of data to go by, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) reaffirmed on Wednesday, October 1, that more lenient sentences are working to cut Oregon's prison growth, with a year-to-year reduction in prison use, and hundreds fewer prisoners than 2012 forecasts predicted.
But the announcement came with a surprising admission: All of the earlier estimates of the effects of those reforms had been flawed. Reduced consequences for ID theft have failed to produce any change, the CJC now says. The commission has rejiggered its estimates to put nearly 150 ID thieves back into its forecasts.
"We didn't take into account that, for most ID thieves, you can convict on 10 counts, 20 counts. It's not like a robbery, where there's one offense," says Craig Prins, executive director of the commission, which forecasts Oregon's prison growth twice a year.
Slackened rules for certain drug crimes aren't having much of an overall effect, either.
The findings aren't catastrophic, but the change means Oregon may save far less money in the short term than previously anticipated. And since those savings—formerly estimated at $66 million in 2015-2017—are supposed to be reinvested back into Oregon's 36 counties, ambitious efforts in Portland and elsewhere may have to temper their expectations.
The development has officials in some of Oregon's most populous counties making an interesting request of Governor John Kitzhaber. In a letter sent on Friday, October 3, officials from Multnomah, Lane, Marion, and Clackamas counties asked Kitzhaber to go ahead and budget that $66 million anyway—regardless of the new projections.
